Youth Fetish

The major flaw of "Punk: Chaos to Couture" is that it does not feature enough punk-influenced, exciting work by rising new designers of today. The repeated pointing to Chanel/Comme/Margiela/Watanabe ages the entire effort, furthering the icy institutionalization. It makes the whole affair less populist when it aims for the opposite. Hotshot young designers Rodarte and Gareth Pugh are included, seemingly to fill a quota for representation by decade, and these brands still come with exceptionally high price points in the thousands. These are not young, of-the-streets designers; they are institutionalized themselves, already.

"Punk" seems to argue that the trajectory for punk's stylistic evolution held firm in the Eighties and stopped dead in the Nineties. And if it did, why celebrate it now?